William Blake, (born Nov. 28, 1757, London, Eng.—died Aug. 12, 1827, London) English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804[–?11]), and Jerusalem (1804[–?20]). These works he etched, printed, coloured, stitched, and sold, with the assistance of his devoted wife, Catherine. Among his best known lyrics today are “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” “London,” and the “Jerusalem” lyric from Milton, which has become a kind of second national anthem in Britain. In the early 21st century, Blake was regarded as the earliest and most original of the Romantic poets, but in his lifetime he was generally neglected or (unjustly) dismissed as mad.

William Blake, oil on canvas by Thomas Phillips, 1807; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Art Media/Heritage-Images

Blake was born over his father’s modest hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London. His parents were James Blake (1722–84) and Catherine Wright Armitage Blake (1722–92). His father came from an obscure family in Rotherhithe, across the River Thames from London, and his mother was from equally obscure yeoman stock in the straggling little village of Walkeringham in Nottinghamshire. His mother had first married (1746) a haberdasher named Thomas Armitage, and in 1748 they moved to 28 Broad Street. In 1750 the couple joined the newly established Moravian church in Fetter Lane, London. The Moravian religious movement, recently imported from Germany, had had a strong attraction to the powerful emotions associated with nascentMethodism (seeMoravian church). Catherine Armitage bore a son named Thomas, who died as a baby in 1751, and a few months later Thomas Armitage himself died.

Catherine left the Moravians, who insisted on marriages within the faith, and in 1752 married James Blake in the Church of England chapel of St. George in Hanover Square. James moved in with her at 28 Broad Street. They had six children: James (1753–1827), who took over the family haberdashery business on his father’s death in 1784; John (born 1755, died in childhood); William, the poet and artist; another John Blake (born 1760, died by 1800), whom Blake referred to in a letter of 1802 as “my Brother John the evil one” and who became an unsuccessful gingerbread baker, enlisted as a soldier, and died; Richard (1762–87), called Robert, a promising artist and the poet’s favourite, at times his alter ego; and Catherine Elizabeth (1764–1841), the baby of the family, who never married and who died in extreme indigence long after the deaths of all her brothers.

William Blake grew up in modest circumstances. What teaching he received as a child was at his mother’s knee, as most children did. This he saw as a positive matter, later writing, “Thank God I never was sent to school/ To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool[.]”

Visions of eternity

Visions were commonplaces to Blake, and his life and works were intensely spiritual. His friend the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that when Blake was four years old he saw God’s head appear in a window. While still a child he also saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields and had a vision, according to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61), of “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Robinson reported in his diary that Blake spoke of visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters.…Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultiv[ate]d.” In his essay “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake wrote:

I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation… ‘What’ it will be Questiond ‘When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’

Blake wrote to his patron William Hayley in 1802, “I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily & Nightly.” These visions were the source of many of his poems and drawings. As he wrote in his “Auguries of Innocence,” his purpose was

To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.

He was, he wrote in 1804, “really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.” Blake’s wife once said to his young friend Seymour Kirkup, “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”

Some of this stress on visions may have been fostered by his mother, who, with her first husband, had become a Moravian when the group was in its most intensely emotional and visionary phase. In her letter of 1750 applying to join the Moravians, she wrote that “last Friday at the love feast Our Savour [sic] was pleased to make me Suck his wounds.”

Blake’s religion

Blake was christened, married, and buried by the rites of the Church of England, but his creed was likely to outrage the orthodox. In “A Vision of the Last Judgment” he wrote that “the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being,” whom Blake called variously Nobodaddy and Urizen, and in his emblem book For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he addressed Satan as “The Accuser who is The God of This World.” To Robinson “He warmly declared that all he knew is in the Bible. But he understands the Bible in its spiritual sense.” Blake’s religious singularity is demonstrated in his poem “The Everlasting Gospel” (c. 1818):

But some of the orthodox not only tolerated but also encouraged Blake. Two of his most important patrons, the Rev. A.S. Mathew and the Rev. Joseph Thomas, were clergymen of the Church of England.

Blake was a religious seeker but not a joiner. He was profoundly influenced by some of the ideas of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and in April 1789 he attended the general conference of the New Church (which had been recently founded by followers of Swedenborg) in London. Blake’s poem “The Divine Image” (from Songs of Innocence) is implicitly Swedenborgian, and he said that he based his design called The Spiritual Preceptor (1809) on the theologian’s book True Christian Religion. He soon decided, however, that Swedenborg was a “Spiritual Predestinarian,” as he wrote in his copy of Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning the Divine Providence (1790), and that the New Church was as subject to “Priestcraft” as the Church of England.

Blake loved the world of the spirit and abominated institutionalized religion, especially when it was allied with government; he wrote in his annotations to Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1797), “all […] codes given under pretence [sic] of divine command were what Christ pronounced them, The Abomination that maketh desolate, i.e. State Religion” and later in the same text, “The Beast & the Whore rule without control.” According to his longtime friend John Thomas Smith, “He did not for the last forty years attend any place of Divine worship.” For Blake, true worship was private communion with the spirit.

Education as artist and engraver

From childhood Blake wanted to be an artist, at the time an unusual aspiration for someone from a family of small businessmen and Nonconformists (dissenting Protestants). His father indulged him by sending him to Henry Pars’s Drawing School in the Strand, London (1767–72). The boy hoped to be apprenticed to some artist of the newly formed and flourishing English school of painting, but the fees proved to be more than the parental pocket could withstand. Instead he went with his father in 1772 to interview the successful and fashionable engraver William Wynne Ryland. Ryland’s fee, perhaps £100, was both “more attainable” than that of fashionable painters and still, for the Blakes, very high; furthermore the boy interposed an unexpected objection: “Father, I do not like the man’s face; it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” Eleven years later, Ryland was indeed hanged—for forgery—one of the last criminals to suffer on the infamous gallows known as Tyburn Tree.

The young Blake was ultimately apprenticed for 50 guineas to James Basire (1730–1802), a highly responsible and conservative line engraver who specialized in prints depicting architecture. For seven years (1772–79) Blake lived with Basire’s family on Great Queen Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. There he learned to polish the copperplates, to sharpen the gravers, to grind the ink, to reduce the images to the size of the copper, to prepare the plates for etching with acid, and eventually to push the sharp graver through the copper, with the light filtered through gauze so that the glare reflected from the brilliantly polished copper would not dazzle him. He became so proficient in all aspects of his craft that Basire trusted him to go by himself to Westminster Abbey to copy the marvelous medieval monuments there for one of the greatest illustrated English books of the last quarter of the 18th century, the antiquarian Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain (vol. 1, 1786).

Career as engraver

On the completion of his apprenticeship in 1779, Blake began to work vigorously as an independent engraver. His most frequent commissions were from the great liberal bookseller Joseph Johnson. At first most of his work was copy engraving after the designs of other artists, such as the two fashion plates for the Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book (1782). He also engraved important plates for the Swiss writer John Caspar (Johann Kasper) Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (vol. 1, 1789), for the English physician Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1791), and for his friend John Gabriel Stedman’s violent and eccentricNarrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), which included illustrations titled A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows and Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave.

Blake became so well known that he received commissions to engrave his own designs. These included 6 plates for Original Stories from Real Life (1791), a collection of narratives for children by Johnson’s friend Mary Wollstonecraft, and 43 folio plates for part one of Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts (1797), with a promise, never fulfilled, for a hundred more. Blake’s style of designing, however, was so extreme and unfamiliar, portraying spirits with real bodies, that one review in The British Critic (1796; of Gottfried August Bürger’sLeonora) called them “distorted, absurd,” and the product of a “depraved fancy.”

Because of the éclat with which they were published, the best-known engravings after Blake’s own designs were those for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave (1808). In 1805 the entrepreneur Robert Hartley Cromek paid Blake £21 for 20 watercolours illustrating Blair’s poem and agreed to publish folio (large-format) prints after them engraved by Blake. The number of designs was whittled down, without notifying Blake, from 20 to 15 to 12. Worst of all, the lucrative commission for engraving them, worth perhaps £300, was taken from Blake, without informing him, and given to the fashionable Italian engraver Luigi Schiavonetti. To add critical insult to commercial injury, when the work was published in 1808, the radical weekly The Examiner mocked the absurdity of “representing the Spirit to the eye,” and the reactionary Antijacobin Review not only deplored the designs as “the offspring of a morbid fancy,” which “totally failed” “ ‘to connect the visible with the invisible world,’ ” but also mocked Blake’s poetical dedication of the designs “To the Queen”:

Should he again essay to climb the Parnassian heights, his friends would do well to restrain his wanderings by the strait waistcoat. Whatever licence we may allow him as a painter, to tolerate him as a poet would be insufferable.

The frontispiece to the work was an engraving after Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Blake (above), which became the best-known representation of the artist. It shows him with a pencil in his hand, indicating, truthfully, that he is an artist, and wearing a waistcoat and an elegant frilled stock, suggesting, falsely, that he is a gentleman. The most remarkable feature of the portrait, however, is the prominent eyes. According to Blake’s acquaintance Allan Cunningham, at the sitting Blake and Phillips talked of paintings of angels, and Blake said that the Archangel Gabriel had told him that Michelangelo could paint an angel better than Raphael could. When Blake demanded evidence that Gabriel was not an evil spirit, the voice said,

“ ‘Can an evil spirit do this?’ I [Blake] looked whence the voice came, and was then aware of a shining shape, with bright wings, who diffused much light. As I looked, the shape dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe. An angel of evil could not have done that—it was the arch-angel Gabriel.” The painter marvelled much at this wild story; but he caught from Blake’s looks, as he related it, that rapt poetic expression, which has rendered his portrait one of the finest of the English school.

Later important commissions included plates for William Hayley’s biography of the poet William Cowper (1803–04), for sculptor John Flaxman’s illustrations for the Iliad (1805) and the works of Hesiod (1817), and for the Wedgwood ware catalogue (1816?), as well as marvelously modest and poignant little woodcuts after his own illustrations for a school edition of Virgil published in 1821 by the physician and botanist Robert John Thornton.

Wood engraving by William Blake, 1820–21, for Robert John Thornton’s Pastorals of …

Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

Blake also published his engravings of his own designs, though mostly in very small numbers. One of the best known is Glad Day, also called Albion Rose (designed 1780, engraved 1805?), depicting a glorious naked youth dancing upon the mountaintops. Even more ambitiously, he invented a method of printing in colour, still not clearly understood, which he used in 1795 to create his 12 great folio colour prints, including God Judging Adam and Newton. The latter shows the great mathematician naked and seated on a rock at the bottom of the sea making geometric designs. These were printed in only two or three copies apiece, and some were still in his possession at his death.

More publicly visible were Blake’s engravings of his enormous design of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (1810), his 22 folio designs for the Book of Job (1826), and his 7 even larger unfinished plates for Dante (1826–27). Though only the Chaucer sold well enough to repay its probable expenses during Blake’s lifetime, these are agreed today to be among the greatest triumphs of line engraving in England, sufficient to ensure Blake’s reputation as an engraver and artist even had he made no other watercolours or poems.

Satan leaving God’s presence so that he can test Job’s faithfulness, engraving by William Blake, …

Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

Marriage to Catherine Boucher

In 1781 Blake fell in love with Catherine Sophia Boucher (1762–1831), the pretty, illiterate daughter of an unsuccessful market gardener from the farm village of Battersea across the River Thames from London. The family name suggests that they were Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in France.

According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, at their first meeting he told her how he had been jilted by Polly Wood, and Catherine said she pitied him from her heart.

“Do you pity me?” asked Blake.

“Yes, I do, most sincerely.”

“Then,” said he, “I love you for that.”

“Well, and I love you.”

Blake returned to Soho to achieve financial security to support a wife, and 12 months later, on Aug. 18, 1782, the couple married in her family’s church, Saint Mary’s, Battersea, the bride signing the marriage register with an X.

It was an imprudent and highly satisfactory marriage. Blake taught Catherine to read and write (a little), to draw, to colour his designs and prints, to help him at the printing press, and to see visions as he did. She believed implicitly in his genius and his visions and supported him in everything he did with charming credulity. After his death she lived chiefly for the moments when he came to sit and talk with her.

Not long after his marriage, Blake acquired a rolling press for printing engravings and joined his fellow apprentice James Parker in opening a print shop in 1784. Within a year, however, Blake had left the business and returned to making rather than selling prints.

Death of Robert Blake

One of the most traumatic events of Blake’s life was the death of his beloved 24-year-old brother, Robert, from tuberculosis in 1787. At the end, Blake stayed up with him for a fortnight, and when Robert died Blake saw his “released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact ceiling, ‘clapping its hands for joy,’” as Alexander Gilchrist wrote. The occasion entered into Blake’s psyche and his poetry. In the epic poem Vala or The Four Zoas (manuscript 1796?–1807?), he writes, “Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy, clapping his hands,” and, in his poem Milton, plates 29 and 33 portray figures, labeled “William” and “Robert,” falling backward as a star plunges toward their feet. Blake claimed that in a vision Robert taught him the secret of painting his designs and poems on copper in a liquid impervious to acid before the plate was etched and printed. This method, which Blake called “Illuminated Printing,” made it possible for Blake to be his own compositor, printer, binder, advertiser, and salesman for all his published poetry thereafter, from Songs of Innocence to Jerusalem (1804[–20?]).

Career as an artist

While pursuing his career as an engraver, in 1779 Blake enrolled as a student in the newly founded Royal Academy of Arts; he exhibited a few pictures there, in 1780, 1784, 1785, 1799, and 1808. His greatest ambition was as an artist; according to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson, “The spirit said to him, ‘Blake be an artist & nothing else. In this there is felicity.’” His materials were watercolours and paper, not the fashionable oil on canvas, and he painted subjects from the Bible and British history instead of the portraits and landscapes that were in vogue. And increasingly his subjects were his own visions.

His friends were artists such as the Neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, the book illustrator Thomas Stothard, the sensationalist painter Henry Fuseli, the amateur polymath George Cumberland, and the portrait and landscape painter John Linnell. Blake’s patrons were mostly concerned with his art, and most of his correspondence was about engravings and paintings. Only Cumberland bought a significant number of his books.

Blake’s first really important commission, which he received in about 1794, was to illustrate every page of Edward Young’s popular and morbid long poem Night Thoughts—a total of 537 watercolours. For these he was paid £21 by the ambitious and inexperienced young bookseller Richard Edwards, brother of the illustrated-book publisher James Edwards. From these 537 designs were to be chosen subjects for, as a promotional flyer touted, 150 engravings by Blake “in a perfectly new style of decoration, surrounding the text” for a “MAGNIFICENT” and “splendid” new edition. The first of a proposed four parts was published in 1797 with 43 plates, but it fell stillborn from the press, and no further engraving for the edition was made. Its failure resulted at least in part from the fact that its publisher was already preparing to go out of business and neglected to advertise the book or almost even to sell it. The work was largely ignored or deplored, and its commercial failure had profound consequences for Blake; he wrote to George Cumberland in 1799, “I am laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist, & Since my Youngs Night Thoughts have been publish’d Even Johnson & Fuseli have discarded my Graver.”

Most of his large commissions thereafter were for watercolours rather than engravings. For John Flaxman, he painted 116 designs illustrating Thomas Gray’s poems (1797–98); for his faithful patron Thomas Butts, a functionary in the office of the Commissary General of [Military] Musters, he created 135 temperas (1799–1800) and watercolours (1800–1809) illustrating the Bible; and he executed 8 watercolours (1801?) for Milton’s Comus, 6 for Shakespeare (1806 and 1809), 12 for Paradise Lost (1807), and 6 for Milton’s ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1809), all for the Rev. Joseph Thomas of Epsom, not far from the village of Felpham (where Blake lived for a while). Later Butts commissioned 12 watercolours for Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” (1816?) and 12 for Paradise Regained (c. 1816–20); Linnell had Blake create 6 watercolours for the Book of Enoch (1824–27), plus 102 illustrations for Dante (1824–27) and 11 for what began as an illuminated Genesis manuscript (1826–27); 29 unfinished watercolours (1824–27) for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress were still in Blake’s possession at his death. Blake also drew scores of “Visionary Heads” (1818–25) of the mighty or notorious dead, which were fostered and often commissioned by the artist and astrologer John Varley.

Pity, colour print on paper finished in ink and watercolour by William …

Of all these commissions, only illustrations for Job (1826) and Dante (1838) were engraved and published. The rest were visible only on the private walls of their unostentatious owners. Blake’s art and his livelihood were thus largely in the hands of a small number of connoisseurs whose commissions were often inspired as much by love for the man as by admiration for his art.

Patronage of William Hayley and move to Felpham

Upon the commercial failure of his Night Thoughts engravings, Blake accepted an invitation from Flaxman’s friend the genteel poet William Hayley to move to the little seaside farm village of Felpham in Sussex and work as his protégé. Blake’s work there would include making engravings for Hayley’s works and painting tempera portraits of literary notables for Hayley’s library and miniature portraits for his friends. Blake rented for £20 a year a charming thatched cottage, which he and Catherine found enchanting, and on arriving he wrote, “Heaven opens here on all sides her Golden Gates.” He worked industriously on Hayley’s projects, particularly his Designs to a Series of Ballads—published for Blake’s benefit (1802)—and Hayley’s biography (1803–04) of his friend the poet William Cowper, with engravings printed by Catherine. “Mr Hayley acts like a Prince,” Blake wrote on May 10, 1801; Blake’s host gave him commissions, found him patrons, and taught him Greek and Hebrew.

Blake had already determined to return to London when he was beset by legal troubles.

Charged with sedition

When the peace established in 1802 by the Treaty of Amiens broke down in 1803, Napoleon massed his army along the English Channel. British troops were rushed to the Sussex coast, with a troop of dragoons billeted in the pub at Felpham. On Aug. 12, 1803, Blake found one of the dragoons, named John Schofield, lounging in his garden and perhaps tipsy. Blake asked him to leave and, on his refusal, took him by the elbows and marched him down the street to the Fox Inn, 50 yards (46 metres) away. In revenge, Schofield went to his officer with his comrade Private John Cock, and they swore that Blake had “Damned the King of England.” The complaint was taken to the magistrate, a charge was laid, and Blake was forced to find bail and was bound over for trial for sedition and assault first at the quarter sessions in Petworth (Oct. 4, 1803), where a True Bill was found against Blake, and then at Chichester (Jan. 11, 1804). (The words “True Bill” are written on a bill of indictment when a grand jury, after hearing the government witnesses, finds that there is sufficient cause to put a defendent on trial.) Despite the fact that the magistrates were all country gentlemen—one of them, the duke of Richmond, who commanded all troops in the south of England, was, Hayley wrote, “bitterly prejudiced against Blake”—with the support of Hayley as a character witness and of the lawyer whom Hayley had hired, Blake was, according to The Sussex Weekly Advertiser, “by the Jury acquitted, which so gratified the auditory, that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations.” He later incorporated his accusers and judges into his poems Milton and Jerusalem.

Blake’s exhibition (1809–10)

There were few opportunities for a wider public to view Blake’s watercolours and his temperas. He showed work at the exhibition of the Associated Painters in Water-Colours (1812) and exhibited some pictures at the Royal Academy of Arts, but these works were greeted with silence.

Blake’s most determined effort to reach a wider public was his retrospective exhibition of 16 watercolours and temperas, held above the Blake family hosiery shop and home on Broad Street from 1809 to 1810. The most ambitious picture in the exhibition, called The Ancient Britons and depicting the last battle of the legendary King Arthur, had been commissioned by the Welsh scholar and enthusiast William Owen Pughe. The painting, now lost, was said to have been 14 feet (4.3 metres) wide by 10 feet (3 metres) tall—the largest picture Blake ever made, with what an advertisement for the exhibition described as “Figures full as large as Life.” The young art student Seymour Kirkup said it was Blake’s “masterpiece,” and Henry Crabb Robinson called it “his greatest and most perfect work.”

The first three pictures listed in the exhibition catalogue—The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (c. 1805–09), The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (1805?), and Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on Their Journey to Canterbury (1808)—defined the style of the pictures and the expectations of the viewers. In his Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (1809), Blake said that he “appeals to the Public,” but he scarcely attempted to accommodate his rhetoric to his audience. The works on display, he wrote, were “copies from some stupendous originals now lost…[which] The Artist having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia, has seen.” Blake also inveighed against fashionable styles and artists, such as the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens—whom he called “a most outrageous demon” (i.e., villain)—and “that infernal machine called Chiaro Oscura” (a technique of shading, seechiaroscuro).

Only a few persons saw the exhibition, perhaps no more than a couple dozen, but they included Robinson, the essayist and critic Charles Lamb and his sister, Mary, and Robert Hunt, brother of the journalist and poet Leigh Hunt. Robert Hunt wrote the only printed notice (in the radical family weekly The Examiner) of the exhibition and its Descriptive Catalogue, and through his vilification they became much more widely known than Blake had been able to make them. Hunt described the pictures as “wretched,” the Descriptive Catalogue as “a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity,” and Blake himself as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.” Few more destructive reviews have appeared in print, and Blake was devastated. He riposted by incorporating the Hunt brothers into his poems Milton and Jerusalem, but the harm was done, and Blake withdrew more and more into obscurity. From 1809 to 1818 he engraved few plates, his commissions for designs were mostly private, and he sank deeper into poverty.

Blake as a poet

Blake’s profession was engraving, and his principal avocation was painting in watercolours. But even from boyhood he wrote poetry. In the early 1780s he attended the literary and artistic salons of the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, and there he read and sang his poems. According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, “He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed […] to possess original and extraordinary merit.” In 1783 Harriet Mathew’s husband, the Rev. Anthony Stephen Mathew, and Blake’s friend John Flaxman had some of these poems printed in a modest little volume of 70 pages titled Poetical Sketches, with the attribution on the title page reading simply, “By W.B.” It contained an “advertisement” by Reverend Mathew that stated, “Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetic originality which merited some respite from oblivion.” They gave the sheets of the book, uncut and unsewn, to Blake, in the expectation that he would sell them or at least give them away to potential patrons. Blake, however, showed little interest in the volume, and when he died he still had uncut and unstitched copies in his possession.

But some contemporaries and virtually all succeeding critics agreed that the poems did merit “respite from oblivion.” Some are merely boyish rodomontade, but some, such as “To Winter” and “Mad Song,” are exquisite. “To the Muses,” lamenting the death of music, concludes,

How have you left the antient loveThat bards of old enjoy’d in you!The languid strings do scarcely move!The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!

Blake never published his poetry in the ordinary way. Instead, using a technology revealed to him by his brother Robert in a vision, he drew his poems and their surrounding designs on copper in a liquid impervious to acid. He then etched them and, with the aid of his devoted wife, printed them, coloured them, stitched them in rough sugar-paper wrappers, and offered them for sale. He rarely printed more than a dozen copies at a time, reprinting them when his stock ran low, and no more than 30 copies of any of them survive; several are known only in unique copies, and some to which he refers no longer exist.

After experimenting with tiny plates to print his short tracts There Is No Natural Religion (1788) and All Religions Are One (1788?), Blake created the first of the poetical works for which he is chiefly remembered: Songs of Innocence, with 19 poems on 26 prints. The poems are written for children—in “Infant Joy” only three words have as many as two syllables—and they represent the innocent and the vulnerable, from babies to beetles, protected and fostered by powers beyond their own. In “The Chimney Sweeper,” for example,

[…]the Angel told Tom if he’d be a good boy,He’d have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke and we rose in the darkAnd got with our bags & our brushes to work.Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm.So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Sustained by the vision, “Tom was happy & warm” despite the cold.

In one of the best-known lyrics, called “The Lamb,” a little boy gives to a lamb the same kind of catechism he himself had been given in church:

Little Lamb, who made thee?Dost thou know who made thee?…

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee:He is called by thy name,For he calls himself a Lamb…I a child, & thou a lamb,We are called by his name.

The syllogism is simple if not simplistic: the creator of child and lamb has the same qualities as his creation.

Most of Blake’s poetry embodies myths that he invented. Blake takes the inquiry about the nature of life a little further in The Book of Thel (1789), the first of his published myths. The melancholy shepherdess Thel asks, “Why fade these children of the spring? Born but to smile & fall.” She is answered by the Lilly of the Valley (representing water), the Cloud (air), and the Clod of Clay (earth), who tell her, “we live not for ourselves,” and say that they are nourished by “he that loves the lowly.” Thel enters the “land unknown” and hears a “voice of sorrow”:

“Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile!”

The poem concludes with the frightened Thel seeing her own grave there, shrieking, and fleeing back to her valley.

Blake’s next work in Illuminated Printing, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790?), has become one of his best known. It is a prose work in no familiar form; for instance, on the title page, no author, printer, or publisher is named. It is in part a parody of Emanuel Swedenborg, echoing the Swedish theologian’s “Memorable Relations” of things seen and heard in heaven with “Memorable Fancies” of things seen and heard in hell. The section titled “Proverbs of Hell” eulogizes energy with lines such as “Energy is Eternal Delight,” “Exuberance is Beauty,” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The work ends with “A Song of Liberty,” which celebrates the values of those who stormed the Bastille in 1789: “Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer […] curse the sons of joy […] For every thing that lives is Holy.”

America, A Prophecy (1793) and Europe, A Prophecy (1794) are even more daringly political, and they are boldly acknowledged on the title pages as “Printed by William Blake.” In the first, Albion’s Angel, representing the reactionary government of England, perceives Orc, the spirit of energy, as a “Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities,” but Orc’s vision is of an apocalypse that transforms the world:

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field,Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;…For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease…For every thing that lives is holy

The mental revolution seems to be accomplished, but the design for the triumphant concluding page shows not rejoicing and triumph but barren trees, bowed mourners, thistles, and serpents. Blake’s designs often tell a complementary story, and the two visions must be combined in the reader’s mind to comprehend the meaning of the work.

The frontispiece to Europe is one of Blake’s best-known images: sometimes called The Ancient of Days, it represents a naked, bearded old man leaning out from the sun to define the universe with golden compasses. He seems a familiar image of God, but the usual notions about this deity are challenged by an image, on the facing title page, of what the God of reason has created: a coiling serpent with open mouth and forked tongue. It seems to represent how

Thought chang’d the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth:To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face […] …Then was the serpent temple form’d, image of infiniteShut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel;Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d.

This God is opposed by Orc and by Los, the imagination, and at the end of the poem Los “call’d all his sons to the strife of blood.” The work’s last illustration, however, is not of the heroic sons of Los storming the barricades of tyrannical reason but of a naked man carrying a fainting woman and a terrified girl from the horrors of a burning city.

In the same year as Europe, Blake published Songs of Experience and combined it with his previous lyrics to form Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The poems of Songs of Experience centre on threatened, unprotected souls in despair. In “London” the speaker, shown in the design as blind, bearded, and “age-bent,” sees in “every face…marks of woe,” and observes that “In every voice…The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.” In “The Tyger,” which answers “The Lamb” of Innocence, the despairing speaker asks the “Tyger burning bright” about its creator: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” But in the design the “deadly terrors” of the text are depicted as a small, meek animal often coloured more like a stuffed toy than a jungle beast.

Blake’s most impressive writings are his enormous prophecies Vala or The Four Zoas (which Blake composed and revised from roughly 1796 to 1807 but never published), Milton, and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. In them, his myth expands, adding to Urizen (reason) and Los (imagination) the Zoas Tharmas and Luvah. (The word zoa is a Greek plural meaning “living creatures.”) Their primordial harmony is destroyed when each of them attempts to fix creation in a form corresponding to his own nature and genius. Blake describes his purpose, his “great task,” in Jerusalem:

To open the immortal EyesOf man inwards into the worlds of thought; into EternityEver expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

Like the Zoa Los, Blake felt that he must “Create a System or be enslav’d by another Mans.”

Milton concerns Blake’s attempt, at Milton’s request, to correct the ideas of Paradise Lost. The poem originated in an event in Felpham, recorded in Blake’s letters, in which the spirit of Milton as a falling star entered Blake. It includes the lyric commonly called “Jerusalem” that has become a kind of alternative national anthem in Britain:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:Till we have built Jerusalem,In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Last years

Blake’s last years, from 1818 to 1827, were made comfortable and productive as a result of his friendship with the artist John Linnell. Through Linnell, Blake met the physician and botanist Robert John Thornton, who commissioned Blake’s woodcuts for a school text of Virgil (1821). He also met the young painters George Richmond, Samuel Palmer, and Edward Calvert, who became his disciples, called themselves “the Ancients,” and reflected Blake’s inspiration in their art. Linnell also supported Blake with his commissions for the drawings and engravings of the Book of Job (published 1826) and Dante (1838), Blake’s greatest achievements as a line engraver. In these last years Blake gained a new serenity. Once, when he met a fashionably dressed little girl at a party, he put his hand on her head and said, “May God make this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me.”

Blake died in his cramped rooms in Fountain Court, the Strand, London, on Aug. 12, 1827. His disciple Richmond wrote,

Just before he died His Countenance became fair—His eyes brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven. In truth He Died like a saint[,] as a person who was standing by Him Observed.

Reputation and influence

Blake was scarcely noticed in his own lifetime. No contemporary reviewed any of his works in Illuminated Printing, but his designs for Blair’s The Grave and his Descriptive Catalogue of his exhibition were reviewed savagely and at length in The Antijacobin Review (1808) and The Examiner (1808, 1809)—in the latter publication he was called “an unfortunate lunatic.” After a flurry of obituaries in 1827 and brief lives of him in books by John Thomas Smith (1828) and Allan Cunningham (1830), the first important book on Blake was Alexander Gilchrist’s two-volume Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus” (1863). Volume 1 was the biography, concentrating on Blake as an unknown artist, and volume 2 printed many of Blake’s poems and designs, most of them for the first time in conventional typography. Gilchrist’s work was completed after his death in 1861 by a coterie of Pre-Raphaelites, chiefly the artist-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother, William Michael Rossetti. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was so carried away by Blake that he published an exclamatory and influential study William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868). Gilchrist’s book opened the floodgates of criticism, and since 1863 Blake has been considered a major figure in English poetry and art.

In the 1890s Blake was taken up by William Butler Yeats and Edwin John Ellis. They collaborated on a massive three-volume, extensively illustrated edition of Blake (1893), which introduced much of Blake’s prophetic poetry to the public for the first time—in texts that are often seriously corrupt: words misread, parts omitted, and “facts” invented. Their work was continued with other editions by Ellis and by Yeats and with a biography by Ellis called The Real Blake (1907), in which he claimed, with no shadow of justification, that Blake’s father was a renegade Irishman named John O’Neil, a fiction with which Yeats agreed..

Among the most influential works on Blake have been an essay by poet T.S. Eliot (1920) and the books of Northrop Frye (Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, 1947), David V. Erdman (Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times, 1954), and Joseph Viscomi (Blake and the Idea of the Book, 1993). Blake’s appeal is now worldwide, and it is not just his poetry that has attracted international attention. There have been major exhibitions of Blake’s art in London (1927); Philadelphia (1939); London, Paris, Antwerp (Belg.), and Zürich (1947); Hamburg (1975); London (1978); New Haven (Conn., U.S.) and Toronto (1982–83); Tokyo (1990); Barcelona and Madrid (1996); and London and New York City (2000–01). Blake has come to be regarded as a major poet, as one of the most fascinating British artists, as an original thinker, and as a conundrum of endless fascination.

Blake’s influence has been traced in the works of authors as diverse as Yeats, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and American writer and monk Thomas Merton. His ideas have been included in detective stories and in formidable novels such as The Horse’s Mouth (1944) by English author Joyce Cary and Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (2002; originally published in Japanese, 1983) by the Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe. Blake, who set his own poems to music and died singing them, has had an impact on the world of music as well. His works have been set as operas, and he has served as inspiration for an enormous number of musical composers, including Hubert Parry and pop musicians.

Britannica Web sites

(1757-1827). "I do not behold the outward creation.it is a hindrance and not action." Thus William Blake-painter, engraver, and poet-explained why his work was filled with religious visions rather than with subjects from everyday life. Few people in his time realized that Blake expressed these visions with a talent that approached genius. He lived in near poverty and died unrecognized. Today, however, Blake is acclaimed one of England’s great figures of art and literature and one of the most inspired and original painters of his time.